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A question involving numbers, but hardly involving mathematics. Let's go to Google Ngram Viewer for some "statistics". It tells us that in 2006, "Jimmy Carter" accounted for 0.0000860588% of X, and "Ronald Reagan" accounted for 0.0001918622% of the same X. I can't be bothered to look up what X is, but I can get my phone to calculate a quotient: tokens of (or hits for) "Jimmy Carter" in 2006 were 0.448544841036% of those for "Ronald Reagan". However, such a degree of precision is misleading; let's call it 0.44854%. (If I understand correctly, this has about the right number of "significant digits", in a mathematical sense. Though perhaps I misunderstand.)
For many purposes, it would be enough to say that there were "just less than half" as many tokens of "Jimmy Carter" as there were for "Ronald Reagan". But for many purposes one should be a little more precise. My own gut feeling (!) is that unless one intended to do further calculations from the figure, "0.448%" would be adequate for any descriptive purpose: that the human brain is such that no psychologically normal person would be impressed one way or another if informed that it was 0.4485% and not 0.4484% or 0.4486%. Three figures -- here, "448" -- are all that are, well, significant.
Does my gut feeling correspond to any named psychological phenomenon? I dimly remember that in my long-ago youth I was taught that, quite aside from limits imposed by measuring inaccuracy, etc, I should almost never go beyond "three significant figures" (and thus that 0.000044854 should be rendered with no more precision than "0.0000448"): this still seems sensible to me, but "significant figure" seems to be a misnomer. -- Hoary ( talk) 08:10, 20 May 2021 (UTC)
Science desk | ||
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< May 19 | << Apr | May | Jun >> | May 21 > |
Welcome to the Wikipedia Science Reference Desk Archives |
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The page you are currently viewing is a transcluded archive page. While you can leave answers for any questions shown below, please ask new questions on one of the current reference desk pages. |
A question involving numbers, but hardly involving mathematics. Let's go to Google Ngram Viewer for some "statistics". It tells us that in 2006, "Jimmy Carter" accounted for 0.0000860588% of X, and "Ronald Reagan" accounted for 0.0001918622% of the same X. I can't be bothered to look up what X is, but I can get my phone to calculate a quotient: tokens of (or hits for) "Jimmy Carter" in 2006 were 0.448544841036% of those for "Ronald Reagan". However, such a degree of precision is misleading; let's call it 0.44854%. (If I understand correctly, this has about the right number of "significant digits", in a mathematical sense. Though perhaps I misunderstand.)
For many purposes, it would be enough to say that there were "just less than half" as many tokens of "Jimmy Carter" as there were for "Ronald Reagan". But for many purposes one should be a little more precise. My own gut feeling (!) is that unless one intended to do further calculations from the figure, "0.448%" would be adequate for any descriptive purpose: that the human brain is such that no psychologically normal person would be impressed one way or another if informed that it was 0.4485% and not 0.4484% or 0.4486%. Three figures -- here, "448" -- are all that are, well, significant.
Does my gut feeling correspond to any named psychological phenomenon? I dimly remember that in my long-ago youth I was taught that, quite aside from limits imposed by measuring inaccuracy, etc, I should almost never go beyond "three significant figures" (and thus that 0.000044854 should be rendered with no more precision than "0.0000448"): this still seems sensible to me, but "significant figure" seems to be a misnomer. -- Hoary ( talk) 08:10, 20 May 2021 (UTC)